Midwest Anesthesia Consultants is an association of over 100 healthcare providers who rely on the organization’s commitment to quality and comprehensive and compassionate care in the areas of anesthesia, critical care, and pain management. The organization’s extensive team of board certified anesthesiologists is fully integrated into the medical staff at every hospital campus location as members of care teams and governing boards.

With a highly regarded reputation for superior care and service, Midwest Anesthesia needed a solution to the mountains of patient and facility data within their systems that needed constant monitoring and evaluation. As healthcare facilitators, security was of utmost importance. And as an organization in which metrics can shift dramatically in an instant, they needed a way to gain insight into their data on-demand and in real-time.

Midwest Anesthesia has a number of back-end and supplementary databases that collect and store information such as patient claims, billing information, patient satisfaction scores measuring services and doctors, and doctor peer quality scores. Years of data is meticulously culled, with 20-30 million rows of data per year. With such a massive amount of data for the system to sift though, Simba Blackman, Healthcare Data Analyst at Anesthesia Associates of Ann Arbor, says it would typically take two to three weeks to create a single report.

The company turned to TARGIT Decision Suite to help them gain better insight into their data. When TARGIT Chief Solutions Architect Boe Pederson got a look under the hood of Midwest Anesthesia’s systems, he knew the best solution for aggregating and visualizing the company’s enormous amount of data would be with TARGIT InMemory, TARGIT Decision Suite’s in-memory solution, powering the data integration into TARGIT Decision Suite.

Fast speeds

TARGIT InMemory was designed to take on the challenges of enterprise-level data management and analyses. In addition to the flexibility and scalability of an in-memory solution, TARGIT InMemory lets companies integrate and analyze tremendous amounts of data at blisteringly fast speeds.

As soon as we implemented TARGIT InMemory, those reports that used to take me two to three weeks to pull data, aggregate it, and get a proper idea of what was going on, suddenly took 30 to 40 seconds,” says Simba. “Immediately we were seeing the rewards.”

Simba was able to kick the tires of his new TARGIT Decision Suite solution before he sat down for his first TARGIT University training class, which he found tremendously helpful. By day four of training, Simba was so comfortable with TARGIT Decision Suite that he spent the rest of his scheduled classroom time creating reports on the fly.

Eager to spread the TARGIT Decision Suite knowledge throughout the rest of the company, Simba sat down with employees to show them what he’d learned.

My CEO was immediately impressed,” says Simba. “I started running reports and [executives] were flabbergasted at how quickly they would run.” What was supposed to be a two-hour internal training session turned into a full-day on-demand analysis of company data. “I would show them an aggregate report and immediately they would start asking questions about the data and it was so easy to drill down to even the individual patient level to get the answers.”

Executives began to call out questions with increasing amounts of detail, from which facilities performed the most heart surgeries down to which doctor performed the most surgeries to which time of day were most surgeries scheduled.

I could drill down and answer those questions in two seconds,” says Simba. “It would have taken days, if not weeks, to answer a single one of those questions before TARGIT.”

Midwest Anesthesia has a traditional data warehouse set-up in the back-end in addition to the modern bimodal in-memory architectural structure but has not utilized the traditional set-up since implementing TARGIT InMemory in early 2016.

More than speed

But speed is just the beginning. TARGIT InMemory is the engine behind TARGIT Decision Suite’s robust data discovery and data mashup capabilities. When evaluating a doctor’s quality score, Midwest Anesthesia integrates data from multiple sources to mash up and analyze doctor hours, number of patient cases, and patient satisfaction ratings against those quality scores to get the full picture of doctor popularity and performance.

TARGIT works really well for integrating all of our data sources,” says Simba. “We can do in a few clicks now what we had to do manually before.”

In addition to insight into performance, TARGIT Decision Suite helps Midwest Anesthesia improve overall organizational efficiency. Simba created a room utilization report that analyzes operating room usage at every healthcare facility. This report tracks room utilization by the hour so physician schedulers have direct insight into which operating rooms in which hospitals are scheduled for use at which time.

We’re now able to look at how we really use these rooms,” explains Simba. “For example, at any particular facility we could see that Wednesdays at 9 a.m. all 14 of their operating rooms are in use, but Friday at 5 p.m. only three rooms were being used. So our physicians know that if they try to schedule a procedure in the middle of the day, they’ll be fighting for a room. But if they try to move something to a Friday, they’ll be able to get in and out earlier. Before, we were only able to look at the start time and end time of each case to see if room usage was overlapping.”

TARGIT Decision Suite’s fully customizable data visualization options have even brought out the creative side of this data analyst. “When I was in training one of the features that fascinated me was the map object. I realized this was just a picture with data plugged in, so I used my own picture of a human skeleton and added the data on top of the part of the body where the procedure is taking place. As you change facilities, the data updates all along the skeleton so you can see in an instant that in one location knee surgery takes place most often, in another it’s cranial, and so on. It’s a really cool report that’s always a hit in presentations.” says Simba.

Putting data in every decision-makers’ hands

Perhaps TARGIT’s greatest value though, is putting the power of business intelligence and analytics into the hand of every decision maker, not just companies’ data scientists. This is certainly true at Midwest Anesthesia. Simba creates reports that make it intuitive for other employees to drill into and edit. But he also teaches as he goes along.

If someone wants a report that I think is easy to create, I grab them and we do it together and that’s usually all they need to be able to go off and do it themselves next time. I have a background in computer science, but no other BI tool I’ve used is as fast or as friendly as TARGIT,” says Simba.

Asked about his overall experience with TARGIT Decision Suite, Simba concluded: “TARGIT has been amazing thus far! I’ve created reports on the fly that weren’t possible previously. Also, all of our old reports look more consistent and have no manual entry required … little stuff like that has made TARGIT awesome!”

You can learn more about the speed and power of TARGIT InMemory in the upcoming webinar and get a feel for how TARGIT Decision Suite 2017 can bring data to decision-makers throughout your organization.

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